If you weren't aware, astronomers don't have a great relationship with Musk. A big issue for us is the Starlink satellites, which due to their low altitude and high number, already regularly interfere with ground-based observations. #starlinked on Twitter has endless examples.
We get told it's the "price of progress" and that SpaceX will make space telescopes cheap anyway. But that's BS: development of advanced space tech is much more expensive than the launch.
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@dpthorngren are there any possible technical fixes, or should LEO just have a very limited # of satelites of a particular size?
Perhaps orbital space should be capped and auctioned by apparent magnitude or some such visbility-relevant metric, like we do w radio spectrum?
@takloufer Well, having fewer satellites and knowing their exact positions at all times in advance would both help.
I'm not an observer but what I've heard is that there are some things you can do to ameliorate the issue at a cost. E.g many shorter exposures means you could lose less when you throw out frames that got starlinked, but worsen some noise sources. Or one could try to model the streaks out, but that adds modeling error and directly affected pixels are saturated and unusable.